It’s amazing how simple life is and how difficult we can make it. Sometimes we act as if were adolescents grounded from our latest revolt and sequestered in our room. Sometimes we stay in that sequestered mindset feeling shortchanged, empty, forgotten and like an outsider, while life is overrun with the wealth of love, possibility and beauty surrounding us.

Sometimes I actually flip between being an “over adult” abdicating the joy and fun available to the feeling of sliding down the slop of adolescent captivity. Sometimes I forget that I am in charge of my attitude, my thinking and my perceptions.

Surely in a world of over 6 billion people, surrounded by the love of God there is no lack of opportunity. Yet our perception can cause us to feel a sense of lack that creates immovable obstacles in our way. When the reality is that the obstacles often lie within us.Believe me I’ve been caught in this kind web of blindness. My own resistance and struggle against what I perceived to be limitation kept me blocked and in the dark.

When I finally took my focus off the story of lack that I’d clung to like a starved dog on a bone, suddenly I realized the closed doors were merely upheld by my own perceptions.

Amazingly, we’ve been given a natural filter in our mind and when used properly we have the ability to filter out limiting thoughts that keep us in bondage. The filter is this: Think only on what is good and true, and pure and lovely. Where there is anything worthy of virtue and praise, think on these things. Imagine the difference in our lives if we focused on the positive instead of feeding on the negative.

How many of us let our mind wonder off into all the “what ifs?” How often do we entertain thoughts of fear and dread that instantly darken our perspective?

When we use our natural God given filter, we protect ourselves from negativity and small mindedness. Is this easy? No, not really, but it’s smart, prudent and the only way to direct our heart and mind in the way it should go, instead of letting it haphazardly direct us.

Dr. Carolyn Leaf a cognitive neuroscientist explains in her book, Who Switched Off My Brain, scans of the brain show that when we're thinking positive, loving, joyful, peaceful thoughts our brain looks like a flourishing green tree. However, when we're thinking negative thoughts with jealousy, fear, hate, or bitterness the scan of the brain looks like a scorched tree after a nuclear fallout. What better evidence do we need to show the effects of our thinking on our over all quality of life and health?

Here we have the evidence for opening the river of supply in our lives. Gratitude awakens us to the fact that we’ve been standing in the river all along.

In truth, there is no shortage of love's supply. When we refocus our lens of not enough to grateful, suddenly our empty becomes full.

The overflow of love that can feel out of reach has direct correlation with our thinking. We can alter our reality by what we're thinking. We can witness our lack suddenly burst into waves of contentment and joy by thinking on what is good and true and lovely and right. The route to experience the fullness of love overflowing in our life begins with a grateful heart that has the ability to shift our empty to full.